Okay so the Safari 4 beta is very fast. It's noticeably faster than 3, and a little faster than Firefox 3, but it doesn't put the full operating system path into a file box when returning from the file dialog. So that means I'm limited to testing files that are included in the application itself, rather than having the option of selecting any file on the system. Safari 3 would give you the entire file path, rather than just the file name by itself, that was very nice.

If the Pre just uses the file name like Safari 4 and Firefox, I will have to add a media path parameter to the options screen, which is already getting a little crowded.

Well then this is going to be good news for you. In Safari, go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced and check the box that says "Show Develop menu in the menu bar". Then you can get a fairly effective error console, but if you're having serious data issues then you'll want to use Firebug for it's stepping and watch capabilities.

Also if you're using both you can do this:

if(console) console.log('ERROR: ' + e);

Safari and Firefox both support the console object for sending your own messages to the "error" console, and it will take anything that is convertable to a string. I find that a lot more useful than using alerts. It's just about the only place that I won't use {} on an if statement, but if I start putting a lot more data into there, that output line can get a little long, but since it's only temporary I will usually just let it scroll off the right side of my browser.

You know, the most useful thing I find with Firebug is the "inspect element" command in the right-click context menu. Shows you the exact element in the code as well as all relevant css styles. I tried the same in Safari 4 and Chrome and most of the time it pops open the element inspector but it doesn't highlight the element you clicked on; it just dumps you at the root of the document...very unhelpful. I wonder if that's a known issue.

Actually, I use Safari 99% of the time because it's so much faster than Firefox. But I do find myself opening up Firefox when I want to inspect an element on an page and Safari won't cooperate (which happens fairly often).

Ken when you mentioned it, I tried the inspect element function in Safari 4 and it seemed to work fine. Still though, I stick with Firefox because Firebug is a Javascript developers dream and Safari's dev tools just aren't quite up to snuff.

And I to need to take back the original statement about the file browse field not working. It doesn't display the path, but still, even though the sound I'm playing is file:///filename.mp3, Safari 4 still seems to find the file and play it, weird.

And Safari might be fast, but Firefox isn't slow. If you want slow, you can come to my work, where we are still required to support IE6. Gag. Whenever I think about it, I throw up a little bit in my mouth.

Ha ha. Maybe it's my surfing habits...I like to have like 20 tabs open at once so Firefox tends to get choked up fairly quickly. Or maybe it's my computer...I'm on an "old" 2.0Ghz Core Duo laptop. Are you on a dual quad-core nehalem xeon Mac Pro by any chance?

The only thing I own from Apple is a 1gb anodized green shuffle that I got as a gift from work, I hardly use it.

My portable system is a HP Pavilion tx 2000 tablet with Windows 7, with a 2.2ghz AMD Turion, 4 gigs of ram and an nvidia GeForce Go 6150. It get's a windows experience score of 3.0. It's surprising how little I use the touchscreen though, so it's more of a gimmick than an actual useful tool, I'm thinking about running Ubuntu on the new Dell Adamo when it comes out, it will be bigger and lighter than the tablet both are good features when you're trying to get more screen space to write code in.

Of course my home workstation is a little meatier, it's a XFX 790i based motherboard with a 3.16 ghz core 2 duo with 4 gigs of corsair DDR3 ram running at 1600mhz, and a nvidia GTX280 sitting under Antec's 300mm fan from the Skeleton case outputting to the Dell WFP3008 display. The processor is the weak spot on the system and it comes in with a windows experience score of 5.9 out of 6, but it still runs Age of Conan at 2560x1600 at 30fps on the high detail settings. I will probably look into replacing the processor towards the end of the year.

Really though if I wasn't stimulating the economy, I'd be saving more and I'd probably still be using an nvidia 8800gt and a 21inch 1600x1200 monitor, but someone has to spend. At least that's my excuse.